This chapter begins with the centrality of the Hebrew language in the creation of the Yishuv's culture. Aside from the goal of establishing linguistic unity in a multilingual reality, the language ...
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This chapter begins with the centrality of the Hebrew language in the creation of the Yishuv's culture. Aside from the goal of establishing linguistic unity in a multilingual reality, the language was also deemed critical in molding the character of Palestine's “Hebrews”—the men and women who were to constitute the new nation. Accent and mannerism were considered reflections of central elements of the new culture, shaping new masculinities and femininities and placing the Hebrews in their new “Oriental” environment. Educational institutions, new popular songs, journalism, fashion, theater, and more were all enlisted in the effort to fashion a new Hebrew‐speaking person in a national Hebrew public sphere. Rooted in part in Jewish mystical tradition in which Hebrew was deemed a cosmically creative force, the Hebrew language emerges as a leading tool in the formation of the nation.Less

A Mother Tongue in the Fatherland : Transforming a Jewish Community into a Hebrew Yishuv

Arieh Bruce Saposnik

Published in print: 2008-11-06

This chapter begins with the centrality of the Hebrew language in the creation of the Yishuv's culture. Aside from the goal of establishing linguistic unity in a multilingual reality, the language was also deemed critical in molding the character of Palestine's “Hebrews”—the men and women who were to constitute the new nation. Accent and mannerism were considered reflections of central elements of the new culture, shaping new masculinities and femininities and placing the Hebrews in their new “Oriental” environment. Educational institutions, new popular songs, journalism, fashion, theater, and more were all enlisted in the effort to fashion a new Hebrew‐speaking person in a national Hebrew public sphere. Rooted in part in Jewish mystical tradition in which Hebrew was deemed a cosmically creative force, the Hebrew language emerges as a leading tool in the formation of the nation.

Imagining Women Readers reassesses the cultural significance of women's reading in the period 1789-1820. While much attention has been paid to the moral panic provoked by novel-reading during this ...
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Imagining Women Readers reassesses the cultural significance of women's reading in the period 1789-1820. While much attention has been paid to the moral panic provoked by novel-reading during this period, this study offers a more progressive and enabling narrative. From the turbulent years following the French Revolution to the fiction of Jane Austen, Imagining Women Readers charts the rise of a self-regulating reader, who possesses both moral and cultural authority. It identifies how writers working in a range of genres – including conduct books, educational texts, and fiction – viewed reading as a mode of symbolic labour, which enabled forms of female participation in national life. Often considered an inward-looking, domestic activity, this book argues that reading was frequently depicted through the language of the public, rather than the private, sphere. Imagining Women Readers offers a unique perspective on the relationship between reading, education and the construction of femininity. In doing so, it sheds new light on the work of some of the most celebrated women writers of the period, including Hannah More, Jane West, Anna Letitia Barbauld and Maria Edgeworth.Less

Imagining women readers, 1789-1820 : Well-regulated minds

De Ritter

Published in print: 2014-02-28

Imagining Women Readers reassesses the cultural significance of women's reading in the period 1789-1820. While much attention has been paid to the moral panic provoked by novel-reading during this period, this study offers a more progressive and enabling narrative. From the turbulent years following the French Revolution to the fiction of Jane Austen, Imagining Women Readers charts the rise of a self-regulating reader, who possesses both moral and cultural authority. It identifies how writers working in a range of genres – including conduct books, educational texts, and fiction – viewed reading as a mode of symbolic labour, which enabled forms of female participation in national life. Often considered an inward-looking, domestic activity, this book argues that reading was frequently depicted through the language of the public, rather than the private, sphere. Imagining Women Readers offers a unique perspective on the relationship between reading, education and the construction of femininity. In doing so, it sheds new light on the work of some of the most celebrated women writers of the period, including Hannah More, Jane West, Anna Letitia Barbauld and Maria Edgeworth.

This edited collection explores the figure of the female werewolf in art, folklore, history, film, literature and gaming culture. Female werewolves are less prevalent in mythology and popular culture ...
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This edited collection explores the figure of the female werewolf in art, folklore, history, film, literature and gaming culture. Female werewolves are less prevalent in mythology and popular culture than their male counterparts, and this collection offers some possible reasons for this. However, the essays in this volume also explore the particular challenges female werewolves pose – to gender construction, to ideals of femininity and corporeality, to racial and sexual norms, and to our concepts of ‘humanity’ and ‘monstrosity’. The book covers material from the Middle Ages to the present day, and deals with a range of media and texts; nevertheless, the thematic links between the chapters create a coherent ‘narrative’ of the female werewolf, while also rejecting a simple linear chronology. With chapters on folklore, witchcraft trials, history, Victorian literature, young adult literature, film and role-playing games, the collection offers a number of critical approaches to the figure of the female werewolf.Less

She-wolf : A cultural history of female werewolves

Hannah Priest

Published in print: 2015-05-01

This edited collection explores the figure of the female werewolf in art, folklore, history, film, literature and gaming culture. Female werewolves are less prevalent in mythology and popular culture than their male counterparts, and this collection offers some possible reasons for this. However, the essays in this volume also explore the particular challenges female werewolves pose – to gender construction, to ideals of femininity and corporeality, to racial and sexual norms, and to our concepts of ‘humanity’ and ‘monstrosity’. The book covers material from the Middle Ages to the present day, and deals with a range of media and texts; nevertheless, the thematic links between the chapters create a coherent ‘narrative’ of the female werewolf, while also rejecting a simple linear chronology. With chapters on folklore, witchcraft trials, history, Victorian literature, young adult literature, film and role-playing games, the collection offers a number of critical approaches to the figure of the female werewolf.

This book examines how the identities of women and girls in colonial India were shaped by interaction with each other, a masculine raj and feminist and non-feminist philanthropists situated mostly ...
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This book examines how the identities of women and girls in colonial India were shaped by interaction with each other, a masculine raj and feminist and non-feminist philanthropists situated mostly outside India. These identities were determined by the emotional and sexual needs of men, racial hybridity, mission and religious orders, European accomplishments mentalities, restricted teacher professionalism and far more expansive medical care interaction. This powerful vista is viewed mostly through the imagery of feminine sensibility rather than feminism as the most consistent but changing terrain of self-actualisation and dispute over the long time period of the book. National, international and colonial networks of interaction could build vibrant colonial, female identities, while just as easily creating dystopias of female exploitation and abuse. These networks were different in each period under study in the book, emerging and withering away as the interplay of state imperatives and female domesticity, professionalism and piety changed over time. Based on extensive archival work in many countries, the book provides important context for studies of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial women in many colonial domains. The book also explains why colonial mentalities regarding females in India were so different to those on the nationalist side of the story in the early twentieth-century. This was even when feminist discourse was offered by a failing raj to claim new modernity after World War One and when key women activists in India chose, instead, to cross over to occupy spaces of Indian asceticism and community living.Less

Learning Femininity In Colonial India, 1820-1932

Tim Allender

Published in print: 2016-02-01

This book examines how the identities of women and girls in colonial India were shaped by interaction with each other, a masculine raj and feminist and non-feminist philanthropists situated mostly outside India. These identities were determined by the emotional and sexual needs of men, racial hybridity, mission and religious orders, European accomplishments mentalities, restricted teacher professionalism and far more expansive medical care interaction. This powerful vista is viewed mostly through the imagery of feminine sensibility rather than feminism as the most consistent but changing terrain of self-actualisation and dispute over the long time period of the book. National, international and colonial networks of interaction could build vibrant colonial, female identities, while just as easily creating dystopias of female exploitation and abuse. These networks were different in each period under study in the book, emerging and withering away as the interplay of state imperatives and female domesticity, professionalism and piety changed over time. Based on extensive archival work in many countries, the book provides important context for studies of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial women in many colonial domains. The book also explains why colonial mentalities regarding females in India were so different to those on the nationalist side of the story in the early twentieth-century. This was even when feminist discourse was offered by a failing raj to claim new modernity after World War One and when key women activists in India chose, instead, to cross over to occupy spaces of Indian asceticism and community living.

This chapter argues that ethnicity found expression through gender in the patient case records, and it uses the tool of gender to explore the function and representation of ethnicity, at the same ...
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This chapter argues that ethnicity found expression through gender in the patient case records, and it uses the tool of gender to explore the function and representation of ethnicity, at the same time finding out more about constructions and expectations of femininity for nineteenth-century female inmates and their doctors, through both quantitative and qualitative evidence. Read together, chapters four and five show gender in relationship and tease out some of the dominant strands of historiographical inquiry about gender and asylum confinement over the past few decades. In particular, it shows that some recurring themes/aspects of the case record material require further explication in the colonial context, such as the emphasis on reproductive health and the presence of imbecile women.Less

Insanity and white femininity : women in the public asylums, 1860s–1900s

Catharine Coleborne

Published in print: 2015-10-01

This chapter argues that ethnicity found expression through gender in the patient case records, and it uses the tool of gender to explore the function and representation of ethnicity, at the same time finding out more about constructions and expectations of femininity for nineteenth-century female inmates and their doctors, through both quantitative and qualitative evidence. Read together, chapters four and five show gender in relationship and tease out some of the dominant strands of historiographical inquiry about gender and asylum confinement over the past few decades. In particular, it shows that some recurring themes/aspects of the case record material require further explication in the colonial context, such as the emphasis on reproductive health and the presence of imbecile women.

Zweig’s female protagonists have become famous in China as the “Zweig-style female figures” (Ciweige shi de nüxing xingxiang). Chapter Five asks what role the portrayal of femininity has played in ...
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Zweig’s female protagonists have become famous in China as the “Zweig-style female figures” (Ciweige shi de nüxing xingxiang). Chapter Five asks what role the portrayal of femininity has played in Zweig’s poetics and their reception in post-Mao China. Employing a longstanding rhetoric that correlates the status of society and the status of women, Chinese critics argued that the depiction of suffering, emotional, and self-sacrificing female figures was the most powerful tool in Zweig’s critique of bourgeois society. Similar to female Chinese writers of the 1980s, such as Zhang Jie, feminist intellectuals thus started to return to a seemingly anachronistic concept of femininity. In this way, however, they were able to express their rejection of the Maoist gender policy and its promotion of gender sameness, thus also supporting a new regime that was eager to distance itself from its Maoist past. A discussion of how Zweig’s “women novellas” also crossed the Taiwan Strait and served the leadership under Deng Xiaoping in its new “peaceful” strategy to promote reunification concludes the chapter.Less

The Ideal Woman? : The “Zweig-Style Female Figures” in Post-Mao China

Arnhilt Johanna Hoefle

Published in print: 2017-11-30

Zweig’s female protagonists have become famous in China as the “Zweig-style female figures” (Ciweige shi de nüxing xingxiang). Chapter Five asks what role the portrayal of femininity has played in Zweig’s poetics and their reception in post-Mao China. Employing a longstanding rhetoric that correlates the status of society and the status of women, Chinese critics argued that the depiction of suffering, emotional, and self-sacrificing female figures was the most powerful tool in Zweig’s critique of bourgeois society. Similar to female Chinese writers of the 1980s, such as Zhang Jie, feminist intellectuals thus started to return to a seemingly anachronistic concept of femininity. In this way, however, they were able to express their rejection of the Maoist gender policy and its promotion of gender sameness, thus also supporting a new regime that was eager to distance itself from its Maoist past. A discussion of how Zweig’s “women novellas” also crossed the Taiwan Strait and served the leadership under Deng Xiaoping in its new “peaceful” strategy to promote reunification concludes the chapter.

Industrialists exploited the powerful cultural, symbolic and metaphorical meanings of gardens and parks to ‘engineer’ particular feelings, ideas, modes of behaviour and well-being amongst employees and consumers, particularly women. Gardens and landscaping had at times been employed for these means since the beginning of the factory system, but by the end of the century, landscaping at factories was becoming more sophisticated in terms of design and amenity. In America from the 1880s and to a lesser extent in Britain from the 1900s, the expertise of professional landscapists with specialist design and horticultural knowledge made it possible to enhance the beauty, function and symbolic value of the available space with the ultimate aims of increasing productivity and profit. Whilst promoted as a means to create a healthy environment, the union of gardens and factories was a form of social engineering to manipulate employees and to promote industrial capitalism as healthy, respectable, responsible and sustainable; therefore gardens and parks became agencies of control.Less

‘The Factory in a Garden’/‘The Garden in a Factory’

Helena Chance

Published in print: 2017-03-28

Industrialists exploited the powerful cultural, symbolic and metaphorical meanings of gardens and parks to ‘engineer’ particular feelings, ideas, modes of behaviour and well-being amongst employees and consumers, particularly women. Gardens and landscaping had at times been employed for these means since the beginning of the factory system, but by the end of the century, landscaping at factories was becoming more sophisticated in terms of design and amenity. In America from the 1880s and to a lesser extent in Britain from the 1900s, the expertise of professional landscapists with specialist design and horticultural knowledge made it possible to enhance the beauty, function and symbolic value of the available space with the ultimate aims of increasing productivity and profit. Whilst promoted as a means to create a healthy environment, the union of gardens and factories was a form of social engineering to manipulate employees and to promote industrial capitalism as healthy, respectable, responsible and sustainable; therefore gardens and parks became agencies of control.

In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of privacy’s gendered history – did this doctrine reinforce traditional ideals of femininity or did it assist in women’s struggle for equal citizenship? ...
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In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of privacy’s gendered history – did this doctrine reinforce traditional ideals of femininity or did it assist in women’s struggle for equal citizenship? Did the legal community initially frame the question of whether individuals should have rights to their images as one of ‘privacy’ because women brought the majority of the claims? Would it have been framed differently, such as an issue of property rights, if men brought cases in equal or greater numbers? The concluding chapter also comments upon the ways in which this history relates to and informs contemporary debates about the circulation and publication of naked or sexually explicit images of women on the Internet. I argue that current attempts by women and their advocates to address the phenomenon of revenge pornography or nonconsensual pornography echo the earlier struggles for image rights and the recognition of a right to privacy that began in the first years of the 20th century. I also reflect upon the importance of emphasising the experiences of plaintiffs as well as the outcomes of cases in legal history; and the benefits of interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersections of law, film studies and women’s history.Less

Conclusion

Jessica Lake

Published in print: 2016-11-15

In the conclusion, I discuss the implications of privacy’s gendered history – did this doctrine reinforce traditional ideals of femininity or did it assist in women’s struggle for equal citizenship? Did the legal community initially frame the question of whether individuals should have rights to their images as one of ‘privacy’ because women brought the majority of the claims? Would it have been framed differently, such as an issue of property rights, if men brought cases in equal or greater numbers? The concluding chapter also comments upon the ways in which this history relates to and informs contemporary debates about the circulation and publication of naked or sexually explicit images of women on the Internet. I argue that current attempts by women and their advocates to address the phenomenon of revenge pornography or nonconsensual pornography echo the earlier struggles for image rights and the recognition of a right to privacy that began in the first years of the 20th century. I also reflect upon the importance of emphasising the experiences of plaintiffs as well as the outcomes of cases in legal history; and the benefits of interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersections of law, film studies and women’s history.

This chapter details the origins of Uncle Go’s gay and lesbian advice columns in a series of interviews with male-to-female transgender kathoeys published in Plaek in 1975 and 1976 in a series titled ...
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This chapter details the origins of Uncle Go’s gay and lesbian advice columns in a series of interviews with male-to-female transgender kathoeys published in Plaek in 1975 and 1976 in a series titled “Girls to the Power of 2”. The historical recentness of Thailand’s public kathoey culture is summarised and some the Thai cultural attitudes to transgenderism and homosexuality reflected in the “Girls to the Power of 2” columns are analysed. Translations of some of the first letters published in Uncle Go Paknam’s “Love Problems of the Third Sex” gay advice column are provided.Less

From Kathoey Exposés to Gay Advice Column : The Evolution of Uncle Go Paknam in Plaek

Peter A. Jackson

Published in print: 2016-06-01

This chapter details the origins of Uncle Go’s gay and lesbian advice columns in a series of interviews with male-to-female transgender kathoeys published in Plaek in 1975 and 1976 in a series titled “Girls to the Power of 2”. The historical recentness of Thailand’s public kathoey culture is summarised and some the Thai cultural attitudes to transgenderism and homosexuality reflected in the “Girls to the Power of 2” columns are analysed. Translations of some of the first letters published in Uncle Go Paknam’s “Love Problems of the Third Sex” gay advice column are provided.

This chapter summarises anthropological studies of Thai culture that provide a framework for understanding attitudes to sex, gender and sexuality reflected in the letters from gay men, lesbians and ...
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This chapter summarises anthropological studies of Thai culture that provide a framework for understanding attitudes to sex, gender and sexuality reflected in the letters from gay men, lesbians and transgenders sent to Uncle Go, as well as in Uncle Go’s replies to his correspondents. Concepts and attitudes detailed include notions of face, shame and public images. Differences between Thai male and female sexual cultures are summarised, Thai Buddhist attitudes to sexuality are noted, and patterns of masculinity and bisexuality are considered.Less

Uncle Go’s Columns in the Context of Thai Sexual Culture

Peter A. Jackson

Published in print: 2016-06-01

This chapter summarises anthropological studies of Thai culture that provide a framework for understanding attitudes to sex, gender and sexuality reflected in the letters from gay men, lesbians and transgenders sent to Uncle Go, as well as in Uncle Go’s replies to his correspondents. Concepts and attitudes detailed include notions of face, shame and public images. Differences between Thai male and female sexual cultures are summarised, Thai Buddhist attitudes to sexuality are noted, and patterns of masculinity and bisexuality are considered.